​David Cronenberg’s erotically-charged social satire is a cautionary tale for the internet age.

​Since I see technology as being an extension of the human body, it’s inevitable that it should come home to roost.” David Cronenberg was referring to his 1988 film Dead Ringers when he offered up this fascinating insight into his work, but to a varying degree it applies to all of his early films, from Shivers and Rabid to The Brood and Scanners. Yet it’s Videodrome which perhaps best encapsulates this self-reflexive statement.

Released in 1983 and hailed as the decade’s answer to A Clockwork Orange by none other than Andy Warhol, Cronenberg’s eighth feature further enhanced his reputation as North America’s foremost purveyor of body horror while simultaneously establishing him as the thinking person’s genre filmmaker. It is a bold, cerebral examination of human kind’s masochistic, subservient tendencies.

Right from its immersive opening shot, Videodrome imagines a near-future in which technology has infiltrated every aspect of daily life. On a screen within the screen, a colourful ident for CIVIC-TV (“the one you take to bed with you”), a Toronto-based station specialising in shlock programming, flashes up before a woman (Julie Khaner) serenely delivers an automated wake-up call. Cronenberg may not have been actively trying to predict the future, but this scene contains an eerily prescient blueprint for the likes of like Siri, Alexa and other intelligent personal assistant systems.

Midway through the festival, the Spectator’s website published a bonkers article headlined “Glastonbury wouldn’t survive under a Corbyn government”. In it, the writer conjured up a dystopian fantasy more berserk than anything you might find yourself listening to in the small hours at the Stone Circle. Chief among the dire presentiments was the suggestion that the ascension of Labour to power would result in Radiohead ceasing touring and instead taking up a residency at a Las Vegas resort.​The image of Thom Yorke serenading Sin City’s high rollers with a rousing chorus of Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors was mind-boggling, but you could see why some press went on the offensive. Politicians have been turning up to Glastonbury for years, but this year the leader of the opposition was among the most hotly anticipated attractions: when he arrived on site, his Land Rover was mobbed by fans. In fact, it was hard to escape Corbyn: if Glastonbury 2017 had an unofficial anthem, it was his name sung to the tune of the White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army.

You heard “oh, Jeremy Corbyn” everywhere: at the silent disco, during Radiohead’s Friday night headlining set, midway through the Other stage appearance by rapper Stormzy, who gamely joined in. When Corbyn finally gave a speech – in a stunning piece of billing that could only happen at Glastonbury, he appeared between hip-hop duo Run the Jewels and Southampton’s foremost R&B loverman Craig David – the crowd brought the entire area around the Pyramid stage to a standstill: in some of its furthest reaches, you occasionally got the sense that some people were eager for him to stop talking so they could get on with the more pressing business of singing “oh, Jeremy Corbyn”.

Labour leader urges Donald Trump to build ‘bridges not walls’ while addressing huge Pyramid Stage crowd, while telling the Guardian it was his campaign’s spirit of hope that chimed with young voters.

​The roar was deafening as Jeremy Corbyn walked on to the main Pyramid Stage of Glastonbury. The 68-year-old political veteran’s appearance was one of the most hotly anticipated moments of the weekend – an extraordinary turn a year after he cancelled his 2016 festival appearance following the vote for Brexit and as uncertainty mounted about his future as Labour leader.

Facing the tens of thousands of festivalgoers who had gathered to see him, Corbyn, arriving on stage with Glastonbury founder Michael Eavis, beamed and waited for the chants of his name to die down. “Michael, you brought the spirit of music, of love, of ideas, and of great messages,” he said, giving Eavis a copy of the Labour manifesto.​“And if you see that far,” he said to the crowd, “look at the wall that surrounds this festival. There’s a message for president Donald Trump. You know what it says? Build bridges, not walls.” The cheering erupted again.

When it comes to the lack of diversity in Hollywood, Spike Lee believes that “Hamilton” has the answer. He points to the song, “The Room Where it Happens,” using it as a way to describe the lack of representation in important boardrooms, packed with white men.​“When you deal with diversity and you don’t have anybody in the room who looks like what you’re trying to do, then you have a fiasco like the Pepsi spot,” Lee says about a controversial ad that ran last spring starring Kendall Jenner.

​Chad VanGaalen will release a new album, Light Information, on September 8. The record, coming via Sub Pop (and Flemish Eye in Canada), follows 2014’s Shrink Dust. Listen to his new song “Old Heads” below. VanGaalen, who self-produced the record, is also heading out on a tour of North America and Europe—see the dates here. Of the album’s themes, he said in a press release, “Being a parent has given me a sort of alternate perspective, worrying about exposure to a new type of consciousness that's happening through the internet. I didn’t have that growing up, and I’m maybe trying to preserve a little bit of that selfishly for my kids.

The off-Broadway musical Baghdaddy has extended its run at St. Luke's Theatre through September 3. It was originally scheduled to close on June 18, and then had been extended through June 25.​Based on a screenplay by J.T. Allen, Baghdaddy (previously titled Who's Your Baghdaddy?) ran at the Actors' Temple Theatre in fall 2015, directed by Marshall Pailet with musical direction by Rona Siddiqui, orchestrations by Charlie Rosen, and choreography by Misha Shields.

David Lynch is coming back to Tuscany for a special Twin Peaks event June 22 organized by the Lucca Film Festival. After premiering the new Twin Peaks in Los Angeles and Cannes, Lynch will present his show in person to audiences in Italy. He returns to the town after being honored by the Lucca Film Festival in 2014 with the festival’s lifetime achievement award.

It was in Lucca during his visit three years ago that Lynch first began dropping real clues about the return of Twin Peaks. He told the audience then that he would like to meet up with the characters of Twin Peaks and check on how they’re doing.

Free download of the first essay by Edmund Berger on Accelerationism (2014) translated into Italian is available: "Underground flows. A Hysterstation Microscopy and Esoteric Resistance »(Rizosphere / The Forces of the Future, SF008). A great overview of the concept of hypersecretion (Nick Land, CCRU, William Gibson, William S. Burroughs, etc.) and on the cyber and / or esoteric resistances of the twentieth century (Decoder, Klaus Maeck, Genesis P. Orridge, TOPY, Guy Debord, Situationism, Chaos Magic, Plagiarism, Stewart Home, etc.), intertwined with a conceptual core based on the Deleuze and Guattari Anti-Edipo, and on Accelerationism ...

A Theory of NothingSimon Sellars

​The mediascapes of late capitalism reconfigure erotic responses and trigger primal aggression; under constant surveillance, we occupy simulations of ourselves, private estates on a hyperconnected globe; fictions reprogram reality, memories are rewritten by the future…

Fleeing the excesses of ’90s cyberculture, a young researcher sets out to systematically analyze the obsessively reiterated themes of a writer who prophesied the disorienting future we now inhabit. The story of his failure is as disturbingly psychotropic as those of his magus—J.G. Ballard, the prophet of the post-postmodern, voluptuary of the car crash, surgeon of the pathological virtualities pulsing beneath the surface of reality.

​​Plagued by obsessive fears, defeated by the tedium of academia, yet still certain that everything connects to Ballard, his academic thesis collapses into a series of delirious travelogues, deranged speculations and tormented meditations on time, memory, and loss. Abandoning literary interpretation and renouncing all scholarly distance, he finally accepts the deep assignment that has run throughout his entire life and embarks on a rogue fieldwork project: Applied Ballardianism, a new discipline and a new ideal for living. Only the darkest impulses, the most morbid obsessions, and the most apocalyptic paranoia can uncover the technological mutations of inner space.

An existential odyssey inextricably weaving together lived experience and theoretical insight, this startling autobiographical hyperfiction surveys and dissects the world where everything connects and global technological delirium is the norm—a world become unmistakably Ballardian.

The book is forthcoming from Urbanomic late 2017, ​see below for details

​If Robert Hastie’s first production as artistic director at Sheffield is a statement of his intentions, I hope to be at every show. His modern-dress Julius Caesar places theater firmly at the centre of civic life. Yet nothing about it is forced or concept-wilful. Every decision works with and for Shakespeare’s text, while gently incorporating the audience into the action as spectators, witnesses, and analysts. The question dissected here, whose answer we must each decide for ourselves, is: what is true rhetoric and what is false? In our era of fake news, this is not an academic issue.

On their awesome third record, I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone, Chastity Belt dial down the LOLs for a long, uncompromising plunge into current age anomie, forlornness, sadness, and the boredom that originates from overcompensating things, for the sake of attempting to discover importance in a world that is progressively hard to disentangle. "I just fall on my face when I’m trying to have fun" sings Julia Shapiro coolly, one of ordinarily on the record she confesses to overindulging for the sake of feeling okay–just affirm. Somewhere else on the record, she looks to connections ("“I can convince myself of anything, so what the hell?”), business (“I wanna do something cool and I wanna get paid”), or even self-misleading (“What good does truth bring?”") to reestablish her to harmony. However by the end, at the squandered end of "5am" reality goes ahead solid: "Communication’s pretty hard.” Chastity Belt's sound feels astoundingly unmoored in time, all freeloaded out clatter pop, broke vocals and longing songs only a couple ventures beneath "rock band"; it's difficult to think about another band that sounds very like this. I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone is not a simple tune in, but rather it's a basic one.